“I’m just saying that, life…uh, finds a way.”
Before we get fully stuck into seasonal offerings, let’s start off with a film turning thirty with all the teeth and claws you could ask for. Between clever girls and Jeff Goldblum getting shirtless, here’s my take on one of Spielberg’s seminal offerings, and how despite middling sequels aplenty, it holds up these decades later.
Cast yourself back to the early nineties—dinosaurs were no new interest for the young and old, but as far as film was concerned, they tended to manifest as jerky stop-motion things or literally iguanas with spines glued to their backs. In many ways, things hadn’t evolved much beyond the clay puppets we had in King Kong back in the thirties. Now, enter Michael Crichton—a scifi writer with lots to say and lots of things that can be said about him. From Westworld to Disclosure, Crichton’s books offered high concepts with lots and lots of author tracts about science, commercialism, and all the things governments and corporations do with such power.
His literary entries were mixed bags—but I do enjoy Sphere, for instance, with all of its mind-bending topics of oceanic deep sea discovery and time travel and so on. Unfortunately Crichton started going off the deep end in the 2000s with his conspiratorial takes on climate change and the like, but that’s another thing.
Still, the book itself remains a fun read—it goes for more of a cynical horror tone, with the dinosaurs largely genetic abominations, and the park itself a folly of commercialized science. There are shall we say some very graphic descriptions of what the dinos do to people, and reading this as a kid all into prehistoric lizards, I have to admit it did prove memorable. When Spielberg came around to adapting it, he kept fairly close to the general structure of the book, but making dramatic changes to tone and many of the characters—arguably for the better, in some respects. Where Crichton got into the nitty-gritty as befits the written word, Spielberg did manage to successfully make something recognizable to the source but with a wider appeal.
And let’s remember that at this point, Spielberg’s career had floundered somewhat with middling entries like Always, and the somewhat divisive Hook (which I find has some good elements, particularly Robin Williams and Hoffman, even if it’s a bit too bloated)—’93 is the year where he came back fully with Jurassic Park and Schindler’s List. And rewatching Jurassic Park now, mind cleared of the rest of the series…it’s easy to see why. The effects and cinematography remain hugely effective—the CG, revolutionary for the time, allowed for dinosaurs that looked like dinosaurs instead of jerky marionettes. It may not have aged completely, but it gets the job done. Mixed with this are practical effects that are still incredible, courtesy of Stan Winston—even that one sickly triceratops we meet looks like an actual real breathing creature.
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| Just remember--technically, that's the biggest chicken that ever lived. |
This goes for the film as a whole—that sequence where the Tyrannosaur breaks free remains arguably one of the best Spielberg’s done, and a masterclass thirty years later. Pacing, buildup, rainy atmosphere…all of it’s done just right. John Williams offers another amazing score for the film, but in this particular part, we have silence there—it’s just the groaning of metal, the growl of one of the greatest apex predators in Earth’s history realized here, and soon, the crunching of car hulls. Nothing in the subsequent films tops this for me.
Even minor scenes are done well—like when Wayne Knight’s Nedry is raiding dino embryos, we have a very intense piece of score and dramatic camerawork for a short scene that wouldn’t be done these days, but those little touches help keep you invested and your attention there. The opening scene also gave me chills as a young ‘un and still does, and also comes very close to the much more horrific feel of the book.
But what about the characters? Well, in the book, the cast, while memorable in its own way, is rather more archetypal, and don’t really change that much. John Hammond, creator of the Park itself, is a greedy venture capitalist…and that’s about it. Alan Grant is a child-loving bag of fun…and that’s about it. Here, we have way more identifiable arcs for everyone—Hammond here is more idealistic, as perfectly delivered by legend Richard Attenborough, and genuinely believes in his creation even if he’s obviously cutting corners despite his insistence otherwise—which gives it all much more of a tragic feeling when it all falls apart. Grant (Sam Neill) starts off grumpy and child-hating, but ends up bonding with Hammond’s grandkids (who…can be a bit grating here at times, but are arguably still better than their novel counterparts).
Jeff Goldblum also gives some rather on the nose rants, but those are nothing next to the chapter-long rants about chaos theory and corporate science Crichton gave us. Still, the essential messages of responsibility for scientific developments remain more or less the same, and still relevant now—whether it’s by state or by corporation, how many times in this day and age do we wonder whether we create something because we can, or because we should?
Overall, having recently rewatched this in the cinema (with some in the crowd obviously those who grew up on it now taking their kids to it—who also cowered in that one scene in the kitchen)—I can say confidently that, for the greater most part, Jurassic Park still holds up. The pacing’s great, dialogue memorable, and as far as monster movie blockbusters go, is a definitive one.
Shame about most of the sequels then. The Lost World followed in 1997, and where Spielberg gave us one of his greats in ’93, arguably gave us one of his weakest then—it very much felt like a cash-in with way less interesting characters and sequences, even if it had the occasional glimmer of fun. The third film was a straight-up monster mash, nothing more or less—you can take it or leave it. And while I admit I did enjoy the first Jurassic World on that level, the followups to that lost my interest more and more.
Still, a classic remains a classic, and with that out of the way, coming up is something also with teeth and scales—even bigger ones, in fact…
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